Remembrance Sunday, 14th November, is marked with special music and sermon during our 10.55am Mass, at which the Celebrant and Preacher will be Fr Dominic Cyrus.  There will be an Act of Remembrance at about 11 o’clock.

The Mass Setting is the Service in F by Herbert Sumsion (1899-1995), who served Gloucester Cathedral for 60 years as Chorister, Assistant to Herbert Brewer and then Organist. From 1917 to 1919 Sumsion served in the Queen’s Westminster Rifles and spent time in the trenches in Flanders.

This year we sing the Motet “Requiescat in pace” by T Tertius Noble, which uses a verse form of Wisdom 3.

Souls of the righteous in the hand of God,
Nor hurt nor torment cometh them anigh;
O holy hope of immortality.
Souls of the righteous in the hand of God,
to eyes of men unwise, they seem to die;
They are at peace, O fairest liberty.
On earth as children chasten’d by Love’s rod,
As gold in furnace tried, so now on high
they shine like stars, a golden galaxy:
Souls of the righteous in the hand of God.

The Anthem in 2015 “Greater Love” by John Ireland (1879-1962) actually pre-dates the Great War by 2 years.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it. Love is strong as death.
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, That we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness.
Ye are washed, ye are sanctified, ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus.
Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation;
That ye should show forth the praises of him who hath call’d you out of darkness into his marvellous light.
I beseech you brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies, a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto to God, which is your reasonable service.

In 2014 we sang the congregational Anglican Folk Mass composed by Martin Shaw at St Mary’s Primrose Hill, London, dating from 1917, with the Lord’s Prayer from John Merbecke’s 1550 music for Thomas Cranmer’s first Prayer Book in English. The motet was “For the Fallen” composed just a few years ago by Graham Keitch, a member of St Michael’s choir.